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If you invested $1,000 in Nvidia 10 years ago, here’s how much you’d have now

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Investing in these stocks would have made you rich by now—here are other ways to invest your money
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Investing in these stocks would have made you rich by now—here are other ways to invest your money

Technology company Nvidia, which manufactures high-end graphics processors and chips, sits at the crossroads of several trendy industries, including gaming, cryptocurrency and autonomous driving, and was recently named one of Bank of America Merrill Lynch's favorite stocks.

In a note to clients early this month, analyst Vivek Arya wrote that the company represents "one of the more unique investments" in technology.

And, if you had invested in Nvidia in 2008, that bet would have paid off. According to CNBC calculations, a $1,000 investment would be worth more than $11,200 as of Tuesday, or over 11 times as much, including price appreciation and dividend gains reinvested.

In the charts below, all data splits are adjusted and gain-loss figures do not include dividends, interest, distributions or fees except on cash accounts. The portfolio value represents current holdings and the comparison charts represent current and historical prices of individual benchmarks, stocks or exchange-traded funds.

While Nvidia's stock has performed well, any individual stock can over- or under-perform and past returns do not predict future results. The company is also facing some new competition.

This month, China-based cryptocurrency miner Bitmain, designer of the ASIC chip, unveiled a new digital currency mining system for ethereum, which some analysts predict could hurt demand for graphics cards like the ones Nvidia and similar companies produce.

Still, many experts, including those from Morgan Stanley, remain optimistic about Nvidia's stock, in part due to the company's reach in many different sectors of the tech industry.

"In addition to longer-term data investment trends, we see shorter-term drivers in gaming offsetting crypto weakness, and progress in data center inference [machine learning] expanding the long-term opportunity," analyst Joseph Moore wrote in a note to clients. He estimates Nvidia can generate profits above Wall Street expectations.

"We now believe that developments in hardware and software have positioned NVIDIA to capture a higher portion of Inference, key to the long term growth rate," he wrote. "Strength in gaming titles, and a new NVIDIA product cycle, should drive growth while minimizing the negative impact of cryptocurrency mining economics moving to zero."

If you're considering investing in Nvidia or in the stock market in general, experts advise starting slow. Experienced investors Warren Buffett, Mark Cuban and Tony Robbins suggest beginning with index funds, which hold every stock in an index, offer low turnover rates, attendant fees and tax bills, and fluctuate with the market to eliminate the risk of picking individual stocks.

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